Sam headed up the stairs of the memorial site.
Chapter Forty-One
Sam was running out of time.
The monument was a pool, or rather a big fountain, with many smaller jets of water ringing the pool in the center, and a pair of larger water jets on either end. Here was something that hadn't been around long enough to have been built when Wilhelm Gutwein had first crashed his plane.
The memorial hadn't opened until 2004.
Fifty-six marble pillars and two triumphal arches surrounded the pool on either side. A wall covered by gold stars — each one representing a hundred American dead — ran along the back.
Sam had been here before, right after the opening. He'd been twenty-three at the time, and the place had been packed.
It was nearly abandoned now.
What am I looking for?
He already knew there weren't any specific mentions of his grandfather here, and none of Wilhelm Gutwein-slash-William Goodson. There simply were too many dead to memorialize individual names.
He was here. Now what?
He checked the phone again. He was over the time limit.
Turning in a slow circle, he waited for gunshots. Explosions.
Game over, man, game over, he recalled the words the terrorist had said to him.
But there was nothing.
Maybe something unforeseen had happened — something the terrorist hadn't planned.
Not the shooting of Congresswoman Bledes.
Something else.
Sam didn’t know what else to do. He was in the middle of the World War II Memorial in D.C., and he was supposed to have found the next clue on this insane treasure hunt, but he hadn’t.
He was coming up dry and he’d run out of time.
Any second, his phone would ring, and the terrorist would taunt him about the next clue. Might he even stoop to shooting another innocent?
Again, it didn’t make sense. Paintball and a bullet? When he considered the Senator’s death, it made him wonder if there might be another player in this game. A hidden figure on the board that no one knew was playing.
Sam’s feet started leading him around the pool in the center of the memorial. The fountains provided a white noise like static that softened the sounds of the few other people in the area, turning their voices into hushed whispers.
The more time he had to think, the more he believed that the terrorist wasn’t responsible for Congresswoman Bledes’ death. One, the death occurred before time was up. It took time for news to spread, even on something like this. Two, he still didn’t have a message from the terrorist.
Conclusion: her death had nothing to do with him.
Sam pulled out his phone.
He couldn’t play by the rules anymore. He’d played by the rules — Congresswoman Bledes had died.
The terrorist wasn’t in control of the situation.
He powered his phone on, pulled up the photo of Global One, and studied the one face he didn’t recognize.
He thought about making some calls. His father, for one. The Secretary of Defense, for another.
But something was tugging at him. But what?
An old man in a wheelchair was being pushed around the memorial by a middle-aged woman. She fussed over him and said that they should just go back to the nursing home. He snorted and said that this was his afternoon out, and he’d be damned if he was going to let some subversive suicide bombing madman scare him away. Besides, if he was going to get blown off the face of the earth, he was going to say goodbye to some old friends first.
Sam couldn’t suppress his grin.
The two of them abruptly turned off the main path toward a maintenance area, then stopped. The old man muttered something, and the woman chuckled, a reaction he took exception to. The man mumbled something else, the woman said something conciliatory. They rolled away to the north, the woman complaining about having to push him all the way past Farragut Park.
“Quit complaining,” the old man said. “At least you have your damned legs.”
In a few moments, they’d disappeared.
Sam stopped at the same place that they had, trying to work out what — aside from the obvious — had grabbed his attention. After a moment he spotted it. A cartoonish picture of a man hanging over the top of a wall, fingers and nose dangling, had been molded into the concrete of the wall.
Someone had been here. The terrorist?
On the ground beneath him was a piece of wadded up trash. Around it, some loose leaves were tumbling in the strong breeze.
Yet the paper didn’t move.
Sam hopped over a short fence, walked down the ramp to the picture, and picked up the piece of trash. It had been taped to the ground.
He opened it. Another address, same handwriting as before.
122 K Street, NW. Washington, D.C
He dropped the address into the phone’s GPS. It was within ten miles of Die Koloratursoubrette’s original crash location in Maryland. He started looking up the name of the owner in the public records.
The other phone, the burner phone, started to ring.
“You’re still cheating, Sam Reilly,” said the terrorist.
Sam’s eyes narrowed. Even though the voice was still disguised, there was something subtly different about it. He waited to hear the rest of the terrorist’s rant.
“I know you sent Tom Bower to the Clarion Call in your place — ”
“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Sam said. “You wanted me to send Tom out to that ship. You practically dared me.”
The line went dead for a moment — it didn’t drop out, thankfully. It went silent. Enough to make Sam literally start to sweat. Had he made another serious mistake?
Then the terrorist said, “You still broke the rules, Sam. You’re going to be punished.”
“Fine. Whatever you’re about to do, you were going to do it anyway. Blow up all the innocents you want. You’re the one in control here. Everything that happens here, from the death of Congresswoman Bledes to every other innocent who dies, that’s on you.”
Another long moment of silence.
Sam heard background noise on the line, and quickly added, “And you haven’t even mentioned the fact that I’ve gone over my time limit without finding the next clue. What are you going to do about that? Or was this dead end planned all along, too?”
He was taking another terrible risk. But no matter what he chose, it was all a terrible risk.
Because that address was outside the Beltway. If he did what the terrorist wanted, the terrorist had an excuse to blow the place sky-high.
Yet if he didn’t do what the terrorist wanted…
Who knew?
“But—” the terrorist said.
Then the line went quiet. Again.
As soon as the background noise came back on the line, Sam shouted, “What about Congresswoman Bledes? She was shot even before I got here! What about your damned rules now?”
He had his fingers crossed that the terrorist, operating outside the D.C. area, wouldn’t have heard the news yet…
“Wait, what?” the terrorist said. “What?”
Then the line went quiet again, but this time it was suddenly cut off completely.
This wasn’t just about a terrorist trying to destroy the American government, terrify American citizens, crash the stock market, and lead him around by the nose.
Sam had guessed correctly. Someone else was at work here, too.
Sam’s cell phone started to ring again.